Russian short-story writer, essayist, and novelist, who
established
her fame in the 1980s as one of the most original voices in Russian
fiction. Tatiana Tolstaya writes of ordinary people, but her complex
style is far from conventional, relying on impressionistic detail,
colorful images, irony, exclamations, and multilayered narrative
techniques. Her work has often been classified as a Russian example of
magic realism, but she also draws on Gogolian realism and the literary
avant-garde of Andrey Bely and Isaak Babel.

"Russian writers and thinkers have
often
called the "Russian soul" female, contrasting it to the rational,
clear, dry, active, well-defined soul of the Western man. The West, in
fact, often refuses to speak about the "soul" at all, insofar as it
applies to a people or a culture." (in Pushkin's
Children, trans. by Jamey Gambrell, 2003)

Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg)
into a
literary family. On her father's side, she is the great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, her grandfather was the novelist Aleksei Tolstoy
and grandmother the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky, her
maternal grandfather, produced definitive translations of Shakespeare,
Dante, and Lope de Vega. Her childhood home was filled with books which
stirred her imagination, but it was not until she was in her 30s, when
she began to write her own stories.

Between
1968 and 1974, Tolstaya studied philology at Leningrad
State
University, receiving a degree in classical languages. While at the
university, she met Andrei Lebedev; they married in 1974. Their son,
Artemy Lebedev, became a web designer and later gained notoriety as an
outspoken blogger. In the early 1990s,
Andrei Lebedev was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore. From 1996 he has taught Greek philosophy at the
University of Crete in Rethymno.

Upon graduation Tolstaya moved to Moscow, where he worked as a
junior editor in the Eastern Literature Division of Nauka publishing
house. At the age of thirty-two, Tolstaya decided to become a full-time
writer and began to contribute stories to Leningrad and Moscow
journals. Except the works of Yuri Trifonov, Tolstaya did not
appreciate much of the fiction that came out in the 1970s. "It seemed
the better one got as a writer the harder it was to get published," she
once said in an interwiev. 'Na zolotom kryltse sideli...' (1983, in Avrora), dedicated to her sister
Aleksanda, marked Tolstaya's debut as a serious writer.

'Peters', which appeared in the prestigious literary
journal Novyi mir
in 1986, eventually opened doors for her in the literary scene.
Originally entitled 'This Wonderful Life', the melancholic story told
of a nearsighted librarian, who loses his will to live a full life
after a disappointment in love. Until 1988, much of her fiction was
published in émigrré journals. Tolstaya's first collection, Na
zolotom kryltse sideli (1987, On the Golden Porch), was delivered
from book kiosks and was sold out immediately. It was followed by Limpopo
(1991), a collection of novellas, which reflected the chaotic state of
Russian society during the glasnost period. Although Tolstaya's stories
did not include political details, the title work commented indirectly
on racism. White Walls (2007)
contained stories from On the Golden
Porch and Somnambula v tumane
(1992, Sleepwalker in a Fog), along with some previously uncollected
pieces.

Tolstaya favors third-person narration. In many stories, the
protagonist is a male – "soul's don't have a sex", Tolstaya has said ('Tatjana Tolstaja', in Sata
makkaralaatua ja yksi idea, ed. by Anna Ljungren and Kristina
Rotkirch, 2010, p. 161). Helena Goscilo has argued that in
stories such as 'Hunting the Wooly Mammoth' (1985), 'The Poet and the
Muse' (1986), and 'Fire and Dust' (1986) a large part of Tolstaya's
literary stratege was to capitalize gender stereotypes only to subvert
them. ('Monsters Monomanical, Marital, and
Medical. Tatiana Tolstaya's Regenerative Use of Gender Stereotypes' by
Helena Goscilo, in Sexuality and the
Body in Russian Culture, edited by Jane T. Costow, Stephanie
Sandler and Judith Vowles, 1993)

In the 1980s and 1990s, Tolstaya spent much time in the United
States, where she took up residence with her husband, a classics
professor, and taught at a number of universities. After teaching
at Princeton University and at Skidmore College, returned back to
Moscow. Her journalistic articles have appeared in such periodicals as
the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, the New
Republic, and the Guardian.
The original texts were written in Russian and then translated into
English.

In Russia Tolstaya has also co-hosted a popular TV show
called "Школа злословия" (The
School for Scandal); the show was broadcast from 2002 to 2014. "I am a
person who likes to try different things in life," she had said. The
American indie rock band Okkervil
River has taken its name from one of her short stories published in White
Walls (2007). With her niece Olga Prohorova, Tolstaya published in
2010 a children's book, The ABC of
Pinocchio, a homage to Aleksei Tolstoy's Zolotoy klyuchik (1939). It was
awarded at the XXIII Moscow International Book Fair.

As
an essayist Tolstaya has written on literature and on current events in
Russia, her subjects ranging from Joseph Brodsky and Andrei Platonov to
Russia’s resurrection and the prize of eggs. "It would be naive, if not
silly, to think that Putin's policies can be influenced by accusing him
in advance of all possible sins," Tolstaya said in 'The Making of Mr.
Putin', originally published in The New York Review of Books
(May 25, 2000), after Putin was elected president. "Now as never before
there is a historic chance to carry out systemic reforms in Russia. It
would be a great mistake not to try to make use of it." Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and
Russians (2003) collected her pieces published mostly in The New York Review of Books
between 1990 and 2000. "Collectively, they become one of the great
political and cultural documents of our time," wrote the reviewer
Richard Eder (The
New York Times, January 26, 2003). Tolstaya's
attacks against feminism and dismissal of "women's fiction" as a
category have annoyed critics and liberal academics in the Unites
States. Reviewing Francine du Plessix Gray's book Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope
(1990), she maintained that Russian society is matriarchal: "To imagine
that Russian women are subservient to men and that they must therefore
struggle psychologically or otherwise to assert their individuality
vis-à-vis men is, at the very least, naive." (Pushkin's Children: Writing on Russia and
Russians, 2003, p. 8)

As a contrast to the everyday reality she had portryed in her
short stories, Tolstaya's first novel, The Slynx
(2000), was a dystopian fantasy of a world which is ruled by ignorance.
Tolstaya started to write the novel in the beginning of the
glasnost and perestroika programs, and finished it 14 years later. Its
original inspiration was the Chernobyl accident in 1986. With this
work, Tolstaya
joined those writers, among them Abram Tertz and Timur Kibirov, who
have attempted to challenge Pushkin's official image in the national
consciousness – in the story a member of the old intelligentsia
carveswith a stone knife
an idol of the poet from a log, bit by bit. "What did he need this
pushkin for? He trembled over it, and he ordered Benedikt to tremble as
well, like he worshipped it. He wrote a lot of poems, said Nikita
Ivanich, he thought the people's path to him would never be overgrown –
but if you don't weed, then it's sure to grow over."

The book was in
Russia a publishing event and sold well, but was received with mixed
reviews. The Slynx
takes place two hundred years after an unexplained catastrophic,
possibly a nuclear Armageddon, has destoyed much of the world. The
protagonist, Benedikt, is a young scribe in the service of plagiarism
industry, who loves books but only as objects, not as instruments of
knowledge and ideas. Benedikt's friend Nikita Ivanovich is ordered to
be burnt at the stake, but he manages to survive with some other
dissidents the ensuing fire which gets out of control. "Ms. Tolstaya
repeatedly makes the point that Benedikt and company are the ones who
are the real animals," said Michiko Kakutani in his review of the book.
"They are the Slynx of the title, a mythical beast,
waiting in the forest to pounce on innocent victims; a destroyer of
reason and a threat to freedom." (The New York Times,
October 10, 2007) Eliot
Borenstein has noted that Tostaya subverts the traditional
prometheanism; in her radioactive world being enlightened by old books
may
well be deadly. ('Dystopias and Catastrophe Tales after
Chernobyl' by Eliot Borenstein, in Russian Literature Since 1991,
edited by Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, 2015, p. 95)